The Devil You Know by Mike Carey

that moment. Each impact pushed her shoulders back against the cupboards. Each made her grunt as I opened her up a little more. Things would get better. They would even be good. But for now, there was going to be some pain and blood. I shuddered in the last moments, my face buried in her hair, trying to hold and comfort her even as I hurt her. She felt so warm inside, and her skin was almost feverish to the touch. She whimpered as she came with me, against me, devouring me.
    When it was over I withdrew from her, trying not to cause her additional harm. Vivian groaned, and her hands clutched my shoulders in a death grip. She shivered violently at every lurching move. She was tender inside, I knew, and would be for hours to come. She might even come to hate me.
    I waited.
    Vivian pressed her smile into my throat. “Thank you, Nick,” she told me. “ Now you can love me.”

After we got into bed, I lay holding Vivian until she was ready again. Then I let her have her way with me. It seemed only fair.
    She liked being on top, I learned, and she liked controlling my rhythm. I didn’t mind being her wingman. It was a nice change from the women I’d known in the past, the women who needed everything but a damned manual to follow along. Afterward, she touched me all over and asked me if female daemons were different from human women in some way. I told her I didn’t really know. That led to questions about daemon anatomy, which led to questions about my parentage. I’d planned to put off telling her about my mom and dad until I knew she wanted a relationship with me, but she was curious, as any person might be. And I felt I owed her that, at least.
    “My mom was born right here in Blackwater,” I told her, holding her against me. “Her name was Mina Wodehouse.”
    Vivian knew the Wodehouse name. They had been living here in Blackwater as long as the Kings and Rinkleys—a point of contention with those families, I knew. I told her the Wodehouses were one of the founding families who came over on the Mayflower, and that my mother’s family had always had a weird history. Both the Wodehouses and Bergers had been regarded as witches and conjurers and were barely tolerated by the Plymouth colony. That had encouraged them to migrate further west and settle here while witches, and normal women, were being hanged en masse in Salem. It had probably saved my bloodline from extinction.
    “And your father?” she asked. She lay clasping me, one hand brushing over the blond hairs of my chest.
    I hesitated then. There was no easy way to explain this, so I just told her. I told her everything I knew about him . Then I waited. I could hear the blood washing in my ears. I could feel my heartbeat and hers. I wondered if she would run screaming into the night as any sensible human being would do. But she surprised me.
    “Have you . . . met your father?” She said it softly, as if afraid she might conjure something malevolent out of the dark if she spoke too loudly.
    “He’s visited me a few times. But we don’t get along.”
    “Your mother . . . did she know?”
    “No. He seduced her young and married her. He used the name Englebrecht. I suppose it was a joke to him. Englebrecht means ‘angel-breaker’ in German.” Vivian waited, so I forced myself on. “He stayed with her until she was impregnated with me, then he disappeared. The pregnancy was so unusual that my mother began to research it, and him. She sought mediums and psychics, and there were a good many witches in her own family, as you can imagine. When she finally learned who—and what—he was, she put all kinds of wards around the house to keep him out. She was so afraid my father would return to take me away from her.”
    She looked uncomfortable. “Did he?”
    “He returned several times, but I don’t recall those times clearly. My mother later told me she would look out a window and see him playing with me in the backyard, pushing me on the swings, that type of